A poultry farmer finds a dead yet apparently uninjured swan on his land. He alerts the government's food security agency, which decides that it looks like a case of avian flu - which could be the one deadly to humans, and in turn might trigger a pandemic. As the vets swing in to action, the agency's IT systems trawl for data on nearby households. Within minutes, everyone living inside a buffer zone miles in diameter has received an automated phone call or a text message telling them what's going on and what precautions they need to take.

Free access

This hasn't happened - yet. But the contingency plan is possible because of a new arrangement through which different government agencies give each other free access to geographical, environmental and administrative databases. The government in question is Norway's, which - in a fascinating case study for those pushing for free access to government data - has swept away commercial barriers to exchanging information between public bodies in a way that Britain could usefully emulate.

The Digital Norway plan requires all public bodies responsible for geodata to "collaborate in the establishment, operation and maintenance of a common national infrastructure". Data "must be clearly and easily available", the plan says.

Instead of negotiating licences with each other, custodians of official data about Norway's environment, land and marine topographies make their data available to all their official colleagues through a national portal, geoNorge. So far, 40 government bodies, 93 utility companies, 17 out of 19 counties and 356 out of 431 municipal authorities have signed up to exchange data through the system. Some 260,000 data sets are available through the portal.

Norway's national mapping agency Statkart, last week demonstrated some of the mashup possibilities that arise. The bird flu contingency plan is already being piloted by the national food security agency, Mattilsynet, and will be extended nationally next year. Another idea superimposes real-time information on shipping movements, putting the name and speed of each ship as revealed by an onboard transponder on to a map of Norway's treacherous North Cape.

Olaf Ostensen, the head of Statkart, says such ideas have become much easier to realise since a government decision four years ago that data should be shared between public bodies.

He explains: "Instead of buying information from each other, we all put money in to a joint fund to finance an information infrastructure we can have for free."

The contrast with the situation in Britain, where government bodies frequently have to negotiate licences to use sets of data created by other tax-funded bodies, is clear. Over the past 18 months, Technology Guardian's Free Our Data campaign has regularly reported examples of government information projects foundering because of the difficulty of licensing data such as postal addresses from one part of the public sector to another. Local councils and the Royal Mail, for example, have been at loggerheads over the licensing of address details - particularly who should receive payment for the selling-on of the Postcode Address File, which is derived in part from data at present provided for free by councils who then have to pay for a licence for the file.

Norway is no nirvana of free data, however. Although the public has access to data on the geoNorge portal, anyone wishing to re-use data in a commercial product must negotiate a licence with the government information agency Norsk Eiendomsinformasjon, or NE, a limited company owned by the Ministry of Justice. Our campaign argues that it would be better to make such data freely available to all comers, in the interests both of democracy and nurturing the knowledge economy.

Taking shape

However, the Norwegian model may be of interest to the British government if it wants to find a way of migrating organisations such as Ordnance Survey from the existing trading fund business model, under which all of their expenditure is funded by licensing and selling data and services, without imperilling their work. And it provides another source of economic data about what happens when one removes some of the pricing and bureaucratic barriers to the use of government-collected impersonal data.

Under the change of law which enabled the creation of geoNorge, Statkart lost its commercial income stream three years ago, Ostensen says. The marketing division transferred to NE. However, "what we have gained is that it is much easier to collaborate with other organisations in the public sector". Geographical survey work, funded out of a central pot rather than from sales of commercial products, has not suffered, he says.

Although still taking shape, geoNorge is already attracting international attention. It was one of 52 projects from around Europe selected to exhibit at the EU's ministerial e-government conference in Lisbon last week.

And although Norway is not a member of the EU, it anticipates the mechanism for the free flow of environmental information envisaged under the Inspire European Directive (which was watered down last year following lobbying from Britain in order to protect the business of trading funds). Most of all, it points to the possibilities for cooperation that open up when government bodies are freed from the pressure of having to operate as profit-making digital businesses.